Hi, I'm a university teacher who's trying to set up an online course for my class.
We've been ordered to begin online courses due to COVID lockdowns, without much in the way of IT support.
I found out that our uni has Office 365 A1 Plus available for faculty with institutional email addresses and I wish to use Microsoft Teams for setting up a course.
I've self registered my institutional account at the Office 365 Education portal and created a Team in Microsoft Teams.
As I tried to invite members, I discovered that I could only add members whose email addresses had the exact same domain as mine. Our addresses are structured as xxxxxxxx@dept.university.edu and I can't even invite faculty from another department to my Team because of their different domain address (our course has faculty from different departments).
Making the issue even worse, our uni doesn't issue institutional addresses to students, so my students have a mix of gmail and outlook accounts which I couldn't invite either.
I suspect such limitation is a group policy set up (probably unintendedly) by whoever has access to the tenant account, because I registered as a free user for Teams with a gmail account and there is no such limitation. I created a Team with this free account, invited my institutional user account and some other gmail accounts as team members without issue.
So, question time
- Is it possible to invite Gmail/Outlook accounts as Team members if the admin settings are set up accordingly?
I suspect the solution for this is the same as for inviting faculty with other domain mail addresses and students will need to register Microsoft accounts with their personal email addresses. Some search here suggets that this is indeed possible and the solution required is something along the lines of this issue and proposed solution. - Should I try to track whoever has access to the Office 365 tenant account for our uni so they can make the required changes?
- Which would be the required changes?
I'd really appreciate some handholding here, I'm a bit out of my depth and I don't think the uni IT staff will be of much help without some clear instructions, unfortunately.
Thanks in advance and sorry for the long post.
